Our View: Stop Pasadena secret society

The secrecy is headquartered at, though by no means limited to, the Police Department on Garfield Avenue, a building and a command team that formerly had a reputation for a relative amount of openness.

But in the process that led up to choosing the current chief, Phillip Sanchez, City Hall held a series of secret advisory meetings with members of the public who weren't identified at the time.

Recently, Police Department brass decided to close down all citizen and media access to police radio traffic after eight decades of those transmissions being on the public record in real time. Now, though it claims to be open to limited requests to listen in to particular radio calls long after they have been made, the city is stonewalling media requests to do so, or oddly - and insultingly - pretending to comply by sending over a bland written list of interactions between officers and citizens in a given period.

Now, in the matter of the police-involved shooting death of Kendrec Lavelle McDade, 20, of Azusa in Northwest Pasadena on

Saturday night, the police and City Hall have held secret meetings with clergy, community leaders and at least one member of the local media - while locking out the rest of the media from the discussion.

Where's the fairness, or the openness, in a city that used to pride itself on both, in that?

A young man is gunned down in what his lawyer graphically terms a drive-by shooting, as one of the Pasadena Police Department officers involved fired his weapon at McDade from inside a police cruiser, and the people and most of the press are excluded from the conversation?

Anger in the community is bubbling up. Who can blame citizens who are drawing parallels with the Trayvon Martin case in Florida?

Finally on Wednesday, police released the 9-1-1 call alerting authorities to the incidents along Orange Grove Boulevard - an alleged burglary and commercial theft, as those are the charges have been filed - that led to the chase and the eventual shooting of McDade, a former Azusa High School football star.

We can only hope this is the first step in the Police Department and the city ending the secrecy and ushering in a new era of transparency.